Hey hey! This site has made it through two years online and 100 posts! That makes an average of 50 posts a year, which averages out to a little less than one a week. Not terribly shabby, huh? In any case, on with the Chinese.

I’ve been having a bit of trouble rounding up truly beginner texts, and whenever I try I end up with an intermediate post. But this one, though not earth-shattering, should certainly do. We’ve got three short jokes here of the silly variety, appropriate for young kids.

Though we could probably skip this info, you might want to know that 晨练 – meaning “morning exercise” – is a much more formalized concept in China than in west. Here, every morning in almost any weather, crowds of old people gather together in parks around 6-7a.m. to do group taiqi, stretch and take brisk walks. This is so prevalent that you can show up at any park or open community space in China early in the morning and see groups of mostly old people doing their exercises. So, while reading the first joke, you should imagine a scene of 40 or so retirees doing taiqi forms in the park.

A little girl pointing at old people doing morning exercises, said: “Why are they allowed to play in the park all day?”
Grandmother: “Because they are retirees.”
One day, the father asked the little girl: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Little girl: A retiree!

Father is teaching his son arithmetic: “One plus one is how much?”
Son: “I don’t know.”
Father: “It’s two, idiot! You get it?”
Son: “I get it.”
Father: “Now, me and you, put us together and how many people is that?”
Son: “Two idiots!”

A girl and a boy are eating hamburgers. The boy says to the girl: “I want to tell you something!”
The girl says: “Don’t talk to me while I’m eating, when I’m done with my hamburger, then you can speak.”
So, when they finished eating the girl asked the boy: “Now what do you want to say?”
Boy says: “Huh, I was saying, there’s a cockroach in your hamburger.”

Huey, from what I can deduce from reading other stories on this site the character 当 is used to mark the transtion to a final state (meaning become) in the 当我吃 sentence this means become I eat or means finish eating.